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Sunday, August 21, 2011

The Evolution of Mobile Phones

The Evolution of Mobile Phones..

Cell phones have become a lot smaller over the years, but they’re bigger than ever in functionality and popularity. Here’s a look at how the mobile phone has changed over the decades.

From enormous, 80-pound, car-mounted beasts to tiny terminals in our back pockets, mobile phones have come a long way. What once cost thousands, weighed 2 pounds, and packed 60 minutes of battery life now costs $99, weighs 4 ounces, and packs 5 to 10 hours of battery life–and also includes a full-fledged computer, a video camera, audio/video playback, and high-speed Internet access.

How did we get from there to here? Let’s take a brief tour through the history of the cell phone. The following phones don’t necessarily reflect the first or best of each type, but instead represent certain phases in mobile phone evolution over the last 50 years.

SRA/Ericsson MTA (Mobile Telephone System A

Year: 1956

In the days before cellular phone networks, the world’s mobile phones lacked a unifying standard. Instead, they used varying communication methods defined on a company-by-company basis.

The 88-pound MTA phone, shown here, is typical in size and weight of early mobile phone systems from the pre-integrated-circuit era. Most were so heavy and power-hungry that they required permanent installation in a car or other vehicle. Very few people owned, used, or even encountered such devices; for example, the service for the model shown here existed in only two Swedish cities and served a mere 125 subscribers from 1956 to 1967.

Notable qualities: The first automatic mobile telephone system (it didn’t require a human operator to manually connect the user to an outside phone line)

Motorola DynaTAC 8000X

Year: 1983

Though Motorola announced the world’s first handheld mobile phone–a prototype of the DynaTAC 8000X you see above–in 1973, it took ten years for the DynaTAC to reach the market. In those ten years, engineers squeezed more capability into less space, and Motorola built much-needed infrastructure–the towers necessary for cell phone service.

Upon its release in 1983, the DynaTAC 8000X became an instant cultural icon, both as a status symbol for the rich (thanks to the $3995 retail price–$8657 in 2009 dollars) and as an almost miraculous wonder-phone that a person could use anywhere. With the DynaTAC, the cell phone revolution had finally begun.

Motorola’s handheld DynaTAC was an amazing breakthrough, but in reality its size proved limiting due to the battery technology of the era. The DynaTAC could manage only 60 minutes of talk time in ideal conditions, while larger “luggable” phones equipped with capacious batteries–such as the Mobira Talkman, shown here–could provide many hours of continuous operation.

After the success of the DynaTAC, Motorola followed up with the much smaller and lighter MicroTAC phone in 1989. The MicroTAC included a novel space-saving idea: Motorola engineers placed part of the phone’s hardware in a hinged section that could fold inward or outward as needed, thus reducing the phone’s size when it wasn’t in use. The flip concept lives on in many cell phones today.

Notable qualities: First flip phone, first pocket phone; smallest and lightest cellular phone at the time of its debut.

Motorola 2900 Bag Phone

Year: 1994

When many people think of the “car phones” of the 1980s and 1990s, they picture bag phones like the Motorola 2900, shown here. The bag contained a transceiver and battery, and the user operated a much lighter corded handset. Owners could carry the bag on their shoulder, but a bag phone’s general bulk mostly limited its usage to cars.

Despite the availability of smaller phones on the market, bag phones remained popular well into the late 1990s due to their long talk times and their superior range. Thanks to heftier batteries, bag phones could afford to transmit a cell signal with greater power, allowing the phone to be used farther away from a receiving tower. This was especially important in the days when cellular coverage wasn’t nearly as widespread as it is now.

In 1996, Motorola further shrank its line of pocket cell phones, producing the 3.1-ounce StarTAC–which immediately proved popular and influential. The StarTAC expanded on the partially collapsible design of its precursor, the MicroTAC, by allowing users to fold the phone in half when they weren’t talking on it. We now call this design “clamshell,” for its resemblance to the way a clam opens and closes. The StarTAC’s general design was widely imitated, and a large percentage of mobile phones still use it today.

Though the Nokia 9000i wasn’t the first-ever smartphone (many people give that honor to the IBM Simon), it marked the real beginning of our modern smartphone era. The 9000i truly was a pocket computer and a cell phone rolled into one, with an Intel 386-derivative CPU and 8MB of RAM. The phone’s physical configuration was novel at the time: Users could open the 9000i in a horizontal clamshell fashion to reveal a wide LCD screen and a full QWERTY keyboard. When folded, it resembled an ordinary cell phone.

The 9000i could send and receive faxes, text messages, and e-mail, and it also had (extremely) limited Web access through 160-character SMS messages. And like any self-respecting smartphone, it shipped with a full complement of PDA-like organizer capabilities.

The BlackBerry brand began in 1999 as a simple two-way pager, but it morphed into a line of full-fledged smartphones in 2002 with the BlackBerry 5810, the first of the series to include integrated cell phone support. Thanks to top-of-the-line mobile e-mail and text messaging (the QWERTY keyboard didn’t hurt either), BlackBerry phones soon became indispensable tools for businesspeople and other professionals.

At a time when most cell phones were starting to look the same, Motorola decided to break the status quo with the Razr V3, a slim, slab-like clamshell phone with a large screen, a stylish and flat keyboard, a built-in camera, and multimedia capabilities. Impressive technical features aside, you have to admit that the Razr simply looks cool (especially by 2004 standards), a fact that contributed significantly to its wide popularity.

Notable qualities: Stylish design, slim form, and a full set of features.

Apple iPhone

Year: 2007

Apple’s ability to rock our world through nifty gadgets should not be underestimated. Between the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the iPod, Apple is responsible for more trend-setting consumer technology than most companies. In the same vein, the iPhone goes far beyond being just a mobile telephone: It’s a powerful pocket computer, a game machine, and a multimedia-playback device. Better yet, it gives you instant, high-speed access to the Web, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, wherever you can find mobile phone coverage. In short, it’s a revolutionary device, and other companies are already coming up with imitators.

Notable qualities: Everything–but particularly the excellent software, the large and sharp screen, the multitouch interface, visual voicemail, the App Store